


Mountaineering

by 4eeldrive



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Gen, Healing, Post-Sburb/Sgrub
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-08
Updated: 2016-01-08
Packaged: 2018-05-12 13:03:04
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,219
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5667025
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/4eeldrive/pseuds/4eeldrive
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Aradia and Jade drag Terezi on a hike in their new, post-victory world. Terezi's exhausted and pulled into herself after the events of the game, and Jade and Aradia try to help her climb out of her guilt and up a stupid mountain.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Mountaineering

**Author's Note:**

  * For [theskyshouldbeviolet](https://archiveofourown.org/users/theskyshouldbeviolet/gifts).



In the end, the real end-end, not a fake almost end with their hands almost on the handle of a door to something better, the game had a funny victory state. Funny in that it spat them all out on a new world, halfway between Earth and Alternia/Beforus, so devoid of anything but a basic landscape that it looked like just another game land. Land of Nothing and Vague Sense of Being Cheated (Again). 

No animals, no trees, a bunch of rock and low crouching plants that looked like they’d missed the memo on what a plant even was. And all of them, all twenty-four trolls, eight kids, one single cherub spat out unceremoniously at the base of Fuck-Off Mountain.

 Fuck-Off Mountain as named by Karkat in one of his last big outbursts. No one else had even managed to pick themselves up yet, and Karkat was already halfway through a hurricane. Just screaming at the mountain. That mountain was his worst enemy. That mountain was at fault for everything the game had done to them, for everything they had done to each other. How dare that mountain. Fuck-off, mountain. Jane had gently pointed out that if Karkat would just turn around, there were some lovely pieces of shale and what might eventually be plant-life to look at. By this point everyone had managed to orient themselves at least a little, and the general consensus to Jane’s observation had been: “nice, I guess.” Feferi and Kanaya had grumbled a bit under their breaths - no ocean or desert in sight.

The world had just gotten its feet under it as everyone was picking themselves up, and in a few hours, it was starting to resolve itself a little better. The plants started to look more like actual plants, instead of mere blobs of organic matter. Kanaya cooed, and gently touched the petals of what was shaping up to be a bunch of lovely light blue flowers, whispering encouraging words to them when she thought no one could overhear her.

“Ah yes, like old germ theory. Spontaneous manifestation.” Rose had said, adopting her best old-man scientist voice.

“Ah yes, bugs manifesting out of the fucking air to eat us alive,” Roxy had responded, adopting her best old-man Rose voice. Some dragonflies flitted nervously by, unsure what they were yet, or what they should be doing.

Damara screamed so loud when the first mosquito showed up and honed in on her arms. Aradia had tried to calm her down, gently patting her hand, but Damara just flopped to the ground in abject despair.

Everyone watched in silence, lounging or sitting, so tired after the ordeal of the game, just watching real things start to exist.

“This is so neat!” Jade finally exclaimed, breaking the silence. Terezi was grateful - Kanaya’s mumbling and Rose and Dave’s non-real statements had left her feeling out of her skull. Like everything was a dream, full of half-sentences and garbled nonsense, and she was about to wake up back on the meteor, blood on her hands or her own cane through her chest.

“Guys lets climb up to the top of Fuck-Off Mountain! We can see everything starting up from up at the top, I’ll bet!” Terezi hadn’t remembered Jade ending every sentence with an exclamation point. She was tired, and wanted to sleep, but Jade’s excitement managed to pass from ‘annoying’ and into ‘endearing,’ even through Terezi’s exhaustion.

“Really? We’re keeping that name?” Karkat had calmed down into mild disgruntlement.

 “Yes, absolutely, everything’s new, you call it something and it's that forever. That's how it works.”

 Karkat opened his mouth to respond, but Aradia cut him off with an enthusiastic: “Yup, them’s the rules in science.”

Jade flashed Aradia a smile. “Anyways, who’s mountain climbing with me and whos going to stay and lay here in the dirt.” Jade paused for a beat, looking around at everyone and how tired her friends looked. “Not that laying in the dirt is not a great pastime, I can tell Damara’s really enjoying herself. I’ll let you guys know what it looks like from up there if everyone wants to take a little rest. Or like, the longest rest that anyone’s ever rested. That’d be good too.”

Terezi thought she’d just stay here and sit a while. Aradia, after briefly trying to coax Damara to come up the mountain with them, bounced over to Jade, joined by no one else. Aradia’s walk was so bouncy, Terezi could hear her churning up the dirt and shale. Terezi suddenly couldn’t remember if Aradia had always walked like that, a habit picked up from goatmom, or if this was a post-death new habit. She wished she could remember, and felt guilty that she couldn’t. A horrible pit Terezi hadn’t even been aware of opened up in herself, and she needed to talk to Aradia so badly. They’d been friends once. She’d barely seen Aradia since she’d woken up and become a god. Was Aradia still a small god? Was Aradia still her friend?

Terezi lurched to her feet. “I’m coming too.” Her words came out all mushed together, but no one seemed to notice.

 The three of them left everyone else to hike up the mountain. Kanaya was busy with the flowers, Rose, Roxy, and Feferi were busy pretending not to listen to Kanaya fuss over the plants. Damara still lay on the ground, Porrim trying to flick away mosquitos while Meulin consoled her. Everyone else had already fallen into long-needed sleep, or just sat quietly, watching the clouds figure out how to be clouds, and their new planet figure out how to be alive.

They’d barely gotten out of sight of the others when Terezi’s exhaustion hit her in a renewed wave. She should have just stayed with everyone else, laying in the dirt and waiting for grass to grow up around her.

“Is climbing Fuck-off Mountain a metaphor?” Terezi droned, wanting them to know just how tired she was without her having to say just how tired she was. Maybe they’d slow down a little.

“Yes.” Jade responded immediately, without thinking, overlapping with Aradia’s cheery reply of “I’m a metaphor!”

Why did Jade’s legs have to be so long? How was Aradia’s bouncy jumpy walk so efficient? “At least give me updates about how far we’ve gone.”

“Sure! We've gone a little bit.”

 “Thanks, Aradia, that’s helpful.”

 The tree line was going in reverse as the trio trekked up the mountain. The trees had been nonexistent at the base, and then slowly pushed their way up out of the ground as the hike got underway. Jade and Aradia had slowed down to match Terezi’s pace - Jade wanted to hold hands with both of them at the same time, it seemed. While the three had slowed down, the trees had accelerated, shooting up around them, leaves and needles shaking to the ground, bark groaning under the strain of such rapid growth. The pine needles kept getting trapped in Terezi’s hair and Aradia kept picking them out.

 After the plant life’s rapid appearance, small little animals started to show up. Terezi thought she could hear birds in the distance - when was the last time she’d heard birds? Amphibians and reptiles started to appear in their way, the trio changing their direction multiple times to avoid stepping on itinerant newts.

“I’m calling that one a ghost gecko.” Terezi assumed Jade meant the new and sudden grape and electric lemon zinger smell that had wandered out in front of their path and then froze. Nothing it about it seemed ghostlike. The painful candy sugariness was essentially the opposite smell from the metallic blue copperiness of an Aradiabot.

But Aradia was laughing at the ghost gecko’s new name, and that was all right by Terezi. As they hiked further up, naming had suddenly become a game for Aradia and Jade.

 Two lizards sprawled on a rock and basking in the sun rays breaking between the trees caught the womens’ attentions next.

“A werewolf monitor!” Aradia dubbed the wholly hairless and fangless lizard, no more than a few centimeters long. The name didn’t match the animal at all, but that was it forever now. Jade guffawed.

 “And that one’s a screaming whippoorwill.” The orange and totally silent lizard shifted its tail at its new name, a soft whooshing sound against the rock.

“Aradia, I’m pretty sure a whippoorwill is a type of bird.” Jade was still laughing.

“Well, now it's a type of lizard.”

“Do you think it actually screams?”

Aradia gave a noncommittal grunt in response to Jade’s question, already moving on to something else. Terezi hoped there weren’t any screaming lizards out here. That seemed like such a hassle of an addition. It would probably kill Damara.

The new world had a wealth of biomes, not like the singular lands of the game. The mountain was no different. They’d come out of the wooded foot into its more marshy middle. An underground spring made the immediate landscape damp and semi-swamp-like. Aradia’s heavy boots squelched through the wet ground, and Jade kept making disgusted noises at the sound of it. 

“Look at that!” Jade yelled as the three of them startled a toad out from the underbrush. “Kanaya would love that one - it's a Vampire Mother Toad.”

Terezi could smell the gritty slate color of the toad as it kicked around in the mud, and was not sure if Kanaya would in fact have loved the little beast. But with a name as on the nose as Vampire Mother Toad, how could Kanaya not love and treasure it?

“Want to take it back for her? It could muck around in her flowers.” Terezi wanted to hold it, just to make sure the new explosion of life was solid and permanent, but worried admitting to that feeling would case everything to be taken away.

Aradia snorted at the thought. “I don’t know, it's kind of a cute little chub. It might crush those new flowers, and then Kanaya would hate every toad forever. Toads don’t deserve that.”

They let the chubby toad stay in its muddy moss home, continuing their hike. 

“Terezi, you haven't named any of them yet.” Aradia had moved closer to Terezi, and she could hear her curled horns whoosh past her head as she turned to look at her.

“Yeah,” Terezi responded, not wanting to crush her friends’ fun, but not really wanting to participate either. The mountain hadn’t started to get steep yet, they’d been walking on the gentlest of inclines, but it was still a little too much. The lizards reminded her of her mom too, and she was upset at herself over that fact. She'd hoped the lususes would have gotten a second chance, too.

“We could find a good one to name like, Small Dragon, or Horned Lawyer or something?” Jade suggested, trying to pull Terezi out of her funk and into her and Aradia’s little game.

“Yeah,” Terezi said again. She recognized Jade was trying, and rallied as much as she could for her. “It would have to be the most perfect lizard though, I don’t know if we’ll find it.” She hoped that hypothetical promise of hypothetical future involvement would be enough for Jade. The company was nice, but she couldn’t quite get past the barriers she’d put up to join them yet.

The three of them hiked further up the mountain, Aradia and Jade having a great time with all the reptilian and amphibious life their footsteps were startling out into the open. Aradia even found some neat slugs after tripping on a rock.

Most of the flora seemed to have sorted itself out. Flowers had stopped popping into existence right under their feet, and the trees had stopped creaking as much, mostly having finished their rapid growth.

A new smell in an ocean of new smells hit Terezi. It was shimmering, like an oil slick, a bunch of colors and tastes mixed together, draped over a more solid smell - teeth or cream or cream between teeth.

“Guys, look!”

Aradia had been busy lifting up rocks to try and find more slugs and bugs under, and missed the lizard as she tried to set down a particularly large stone without squashing its new underside residents. Jade saw the last of it though.

“Wow! That lizard was so pretty! Did you see it’s little wings Aradia?” 

“No!” Aradia dashed over, clearly disappointed.

“Yeah, it was like all shimmery, kind of like a pearl? And had these little flaps under its arms. Do you think it could glide on them? I know there’s snakes that can do that.”

“Snakes? Are you serious?”

“The Lizard Lawyer.” Terezi murmured reverently, pulling Jade and Aradia out of the snake spiral they were rapidly approaching.

Aradia started laughing, her deep and heavy laugh that always devolved into coughing. 

“Godspeed, Lizard Lawyer.” Jade waved at the underbrush where the little guy had crawled off to. The three stood in the same spot, hoping the lizard would come back. It didn’t and they eventually set out again, Aradia sighing and swiveling her head back and forth, still hoping the lizard would come darting out from the underbrush so she could see it.

The Lizard Lawyer had a safe smell. The game had always had undertones of plastic to every smell, which Terezi had initially chalked up to being the default smell of game constructs. But then the trolls had all started to take on the smell, underneath their natural ones. Even the humans did, regardless of their natural smells from the weird all-over sweating thermoregulation they did. The lizard hadn’t had it - nothing did, but the lizard especially was so devoid of the game world that Terezi had to smile a bit.

They’d stopped to take a break, Terezi flopping down on the ground and Jade and Aradia immediately crowded around her. Miles of space to sit down, but Aradia absolutely needed her knees to be bumping against Terezi’s.

Terezi had missed her.

Guilt reverberated through her like she was a drum that some stupid wriggler wouldn’t stop hitting. Guilt about Aradia, about Vriska, about herself, about the whole sordid game. They’d won, but she still felt so guilty.

 “Aradia I, “ she started to say something, maybe to ask about her walk, or to complain about her lizard naming schemes, or to apologize for her original death all those years ago; she suddenly wasn’t even sure of what she had wanted to say. Her voice had started to crack, and that was unacceptable. But Aradia and Jade looked at her expectantly, waiting for Terezi to say something.

“Aw, Terezi, what’s up?” Aradia’s voice had gone softer and quieter than it normally was, and Terezi hated it. This was all Aradia’s fault, this was all Vriska’s fault, this was all Terezi’s own fault, everything was her own fault. She couldn’t stand how Aradia’s eyes had gotten so wide and alarmed like that, or the way Jade had nervously started cracking her knuckles.

“Nothing, I just, I,” Terezi sputtered. This was awful, she wanted to run back down the mountain, past all the new-named lizards and frogs. Maybe she’d find Damara and stretch out on a rock with her and just wallow and cry. Maybe she'd sprawl out in Kanaya's flowers and wait for them to grow over her head, swallow her up. She felt she deserved that at least, in a hybrid of self-pity and self-hatred.

But then Jade was pulling her into a hug, strong and comforting. Aradia too, immediately moved closer to her, gently pressing her forehead against Terezi’s, the gentlest ram head-butt that had probably ever existed.

“She’s sad that I stole a poor bird’s name to give to a lizard,” Aradia murmured, pretending like she was assuring Jade. It was a kind out that Aradia gave her, if a weak one. “She just loves birds a lot.”

“Oh my god, yeah.” Jade readily agreed, still pulling Terezi tight against her chest. “That poor bird, Aradia, how could you?”

Terezi sniffled, but the urge to cry had already passed. “Thanks guys.” She rubbed her eyes with the palm of her hand, briefly knocking her glasses up onto her forehead.

The hairs on Jade arms tickled against Terezi’s smooth carapaced limbs, and Aradia’s hot breath puffed against her face. Terezi started to relax. It would even be okay if she cried. Jade gently kissed her on the side of the head. Terezi didn’t cry. She breathed heavily and steadily as the other two women embraced her and held her up.

“I’m pretty done with hiking, yeah?” Jade said, when they finally pulled apart. Aradia squeezed Terezi’s hand and nodded.

“So, we’re hiking back down?” Terezi felt a little better, the warmth of the other two women relaxing her, but the trek back down still seemed an exhausting labor.

“Nu-uh, I said I’m done with hiking.” Jade started to wriggle her feet out of her shoes, not bothering to undo the laces. She wiggled her toes in the grass. Aradia slowly lowered herself onto the ground, laying down on her stomach. She was still holding Terezi’s hand and pulled her further down with her. Terezi wasn’t going to let go until Aradia did. 

The three of them lay down in the grass, heads meeting in a kind of halo. Clouds passed by overhead, and Terezi almost wished Aradia and Jade would start up their dumb naming game again with the clouds, just for there to be some talking. There had to be at least one that could conceivably look like a ghost or a dog or whatever if Jade or Aradia squinted. The silence was okay too, though. As much as Terezi wanted to hear the other two chatter, she wasn’t sure she could deal with talking at the moment. What would she say? She’d just stutter again and maybe cry.

Aradia and Jade seemed to understand and kept quiet. Jade sighed, Aradia still held Terezi’s hand, and Terezi’s tense muscles finally started to unwind, a trap at last releasing.

 “I’m gonna take a nap, guys.” Terezi murmured, stretching her legs a little bit. She yawned, and it caused a chain reaction.

“That's such a good idea!” Jade yawned too, barely able to finish her sentence. Aradia followed suit, and was then the first to fall asleep. She snored, and Jade rolled her onto her side, which only helped a little. Terezi didn’t really mind though, it was nice to be reminded that Aradia was alive - that they were all alive.

 When Terezi woke up, they’d all moved closer together in sleeping. Jade’s head was nestled on her shoulder, and Aradia, unable to similarly nuzzle into Terezi due to her horns, had instead rolled up right next to her, threatening to inch completely on top of her. Terezi didn’t want to wake up either of them just yet. 

The sky was clear, the new world was waiting, and it could keep waiting a little longer. Some loud bird, or maybe the usurper screaming whippoorwill was calling, shrill and repeated on the mountain, over and over, waiting for an answer. In the trees above Terezi and her napping friends another bird answered, calling back to the first of its kind that more were coming.

 

**Author's Note:**

> I think this is more hurt/comfort than the fluff you asked for, but I hope you still like it.


End file.
